SURF: A connectivity-based space filling curve construction algorithm in high genus 3D surface WSNs

Many applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require that sensor observations in a given monitoring area be aggregated in a serial fashion. This demands a routing path to be constructed traversing all sensors in that area, which is also called to linearize the network. In this paper, we present SURF, a Space filling cURve construction scheme for high genus 3D surFace WSNs, yielding a traversal path provably aperiodic (that is, any node is covered at most a constant number of times). SURF first utilizes the hop-count distance function to construct the iso-contour in discrete settings, then it uses the concept of the Reeb graph and the maximum cut set to divide the network into different regions. Finally it conducts a novel serial traversal scheme, enabling the traversal within and between regions. To the best of our knowledge, SURF is the first high genus 3D surface WSNs targeted and pure connectivity-based solution for linearizing the networks. It is fully distributed and highly scalable, requiring a nearly constant storage and communication cost per node in the network. Extensive simulations on several representative networks demonstrate that SURF works well on high genus 3D surface WSNs.